November 29, 2005

Cybermundanity

How was your Cyber Monday? In case you missed out on the avalanche of hype, online retailers promoted yesterday as "Cyber Monday," a brand-new coinage. While "Black
Friday" — the day after Thanksgiving — kicks off the traditional
holiday shopping season, online shopping is supposed to follow suit on
the following Monday with a big spike in purchases. But the Monday
after Thanksgiving has in the past
proven to be only the the twelfth-biggest online shopping day of the
year, according to Business
Week, which exposes the new name as little more than a clever
marketing ploy:

It turns out that Shop.org, an association for
retailers that sell
online, dreamed up the term just days before putting out a Nov. 21
press release touting Cyber Monday as "one of the biggest online
shopping days of the year."

The idea was born when a few people at the organization were
brainstorming about how to promote online shopping, says Shop.org
Executive Director Scott Silverman, who answered his phone, "Happy
Cyber Monday." They quickly discarded suggestions such as Black Monday
(too much like Black Friday), Blue Monday (not very cheery), and Green
Monday (too environmentalist), and settled on Cyber Monday. "It's not
the biggest day," Silverman concedes. "But it was an opportunity to
create some consumer excitement."

Still, as far as marketing ploys go, the coinage of "Cyber Monday"
has by all accounts been an overwhelming success. (The
neologism-hunters have been hot on
its trail: Paul McFedries of The Word Spy
reported it on Nov. 25, Barry Popik of the American
Dialect Society on Nov. 26, and Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued
Word Wrester on Nov. 27.) The first known media mention of "Cyber
Monday" was in a Nov. 19 New York Times article, as the Times evidently
had the inside line on the machinations at Shop.org. After the
official press release two days later, "Cyber Monday" spread extremely
quickly, aided by numerous mentions from both traditional and online
media outlets.

And how might we measure the initial spread of the coinage? Not
surprisingly,
the Business Week writer takes the easy way out and trumpets a Googlecount in the article's lead paragraph:

Do a Google search on "Cyber Monday," and you
get as many as 779,000
results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a
half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the
U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

A count of 779,000 is impressive to be sure (though the article is
careful to hedge its bets by saying "as
many as 779,000 results"). But as we've seen time
and again,
Googlecounts of any sizable magnitude simply aren't trustworthy.
There's no reason to expect this number to be particularly meaningful.

At the moment, Google tells me there are about 740,000 results
for "Cyber Monday." No matter: Googlecounts can vary quite a bit
according to time and place accessed, and that's only 5 percent off
from the Business Week count.
I then cross-checked the count against Yahoo, which search-engine
observers such as Jean
Véronis find to be generally more consistent in its
reporting of
counts returned (though it too has its shortcomings). Yahoo
currently
yields about 751,000 results for "Cyber Monday," so there's no big
discrepancy
between the two search engines.

If we skim through the results on both search engines, however,
we'll see
a lot of repeated text. Theoretically, this should be offset by the
search strategy I previously discussed,
where one finds the count for "most relevant results" by appending
"&start=950" to the end of the URL (for Yahoo, "&b=1000" does
the trick). But this yields some odd conclusions. Though both search
engines max out their "most relevant results" at about 1,000, only Yahoo
reaches that limit for "Cyber Monday" — Google
reports only about 500 distinct results!

Surely there must be more than 500 appearances of the term that
Google considers non-identical. I'd expect this to be yet another
spurious figure, based on some quirk in the algorithm Google uses to
compare pages to judge their similarity. Even if this number is
far too low, the repetitions of text involving "Cyber Monday" are extremely frequent. For instance, many sites reprint a Nov. 25 article by Reuters
under the headline, "Online retailers await 'Cyber Monday.'" How many
of the Google and Yahoo results use this text? Quite a large
proportion, if the total results have even a modest degree of
reliability. Here is what I currently get (though of course I cannot guarantee that these figures will come close to approximating anyone else's results):

Google

Yahoo

"Cyber
Monday"

740,000

751,000

"await
Cyber
Monday"

402,000

284,000

percentage
using "await"

54

38

Disjunctive queries to determine the non-Reuters appearances are
reasonably consistent with these numbers: <"Cyber Monday" -"await
Cyber Monday"> at the moment yields 381,000 results on Google
and 478,000 on Yahoo,
roughly what one would expect by subtracting the above figures. Could a
third to a half of the search results for "Cyber Monday" really
reproduce the Reuters article, or at least its headline?

A look at some of the results for "await Cyber Monday" indicates
that a huge number of websites include automatic feeds of news stories
from Reuters and other wire services, mostly via RSS services provided
by such portals as Yahoo News
or CNET
News.com. The Reuters headline was included in the feeds for top
news stories, and it thus appeared automatically on countless sites.

Beyond the reproduction of the Reuters headline, it's also important
to consider the provenance of this particular term. "Cyber Monday" was
invented by online retailers for the express purpose of boosting their
Web-based sales. It wouldn't be at all surprising if various websites
were flooding the search engines with text on "Cyber Monday" in the
lead-up to the big day as a way of building the hype.

This is yet another object lesson in the unreliability of counts provided by Google and other search engines: words and phrases thrust suddenly into circulation may show very misleading counts, at least until an initial period of volatility passes. (Further evidence for this volatility: I waited a few hours and checked Google again, and now it gives me 1,010,000 results for "Cyber Monday" and 585,000 for "await Cyber Monday"! I would expect the number of raw hits to continue fluctuating wildly over the next few days. Still, the "await" ratio doesn't seem to have changed much, with 58 percent of Google's results now apparently derived from the Reuters headline — not that I put much stock in that figure either.)

When the retailers count up their profits, they'll find out the
extent to which the "Cyber Monday" hype paid off. Whether the marketing campaign had any lasting effect on the lexicon remains to be seen. Many of the results returned by the search engines (particularly those generated by news feeds) will soon fade away, and "Cyber Monday" may quickly be forgotten
— at least until next year, when the inevitable marketing
machinery kicks into gear once again.